


Fell White

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, Hallucinations, Insomnia, Kinloch Hold, Kirkwall, Lyrium Addiction, Mages and Templars, Minor Violence, Nightmares, PTSD, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, The Chantry, The Gallows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:35:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2383496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts





	1. you used to be alright

In Cullen’s twenty-fifth summer, just before All Soul’s Day, there’d been a tremendous fire in the forest near Lake Calenhad.  For days it had burned, a wall of flame eating up the horizon, cutting across the Bannorn’s green bulk.  Cullen had watched the blaze from the Circle tower, fearing the primal, inexorable hunger of that fire.  But distance was unreliable from that height, and though he’d smelled the smoke of a thousand trees through the walls, the fire hadn’t really come close enough to threaten the tower.  
  
It was that sooty scent he recalled while willing himself to sleep now.  But here candlesmoke teased the air, not ash, and the Gallows stone around him was an imperfect echo of the Circle’s chambers.  He must have slept in those days, his mind must have been quieter somehow.  But the trick seemed lost.  
  
On this the third occasion of sleeplessness at his new post in Kirkwall, he lay in bed for only an hour before getting up again. He dressed, slipped on his boots, and went down the corridor toward the main hall.  
  
They were nothing alike in form, but the Gallows reminded him of the Chantry children’s house in which he’d grown up.  At least the Gallows had the morbid decency of an honest title, while the other had been a house in name only.   
  
“Knight-Captain,” said the overnight guard patrolling outside the barracks. Cullen nodded at her and passed through on his way to the kitchen.  One open doorway after another yielded the sounds of sleeping people.  He slowed, stopped, and stood in the weak light to watch them.   
  
Row after row, throughout the bunks, they snored and mumbled in their sleep.  Some whimpered, dreaming.  More than a few rubbed themselves under their blankets, sighing their satisfaction.  For months piling on, from Kinloch to Greenfell to Kirkwall, he’d been unable to do even that for himself.  With raw acceptance, Cullen moved on down the hall.   
  
There was so much lyrium in the Gallows, more bald consumption than he’d ever witnessed in Ferelden. Among these Marchers it flowed as freely as water from a pump.    
  
Cullen knew its itch. _Need, need, need_. His blood chanted for it.  

But the color of his need was not blue.  
  
In the kitchen, he retrieved a jug of milk and poured a measure into a nearby cup.  There was a poppy powder he could take, a bit of leftover treatment from Greenfell, but since arriving in Kirkwall he’d refused its comfort.  It made him dull, even hours after waking.  He respected his charges too much to give them a dozy Captain, so the powder remained in his trunk.    
  
Gulping softly, Cullen took his cup and stood in the passage leading to the yard.  A knight made a poor parent, and service was an uneven upbringing.  The children’s house, the templar hall, and the Circle brimmed with the most basic sort of loneliness.  
  
With the empty cup in his hand, he found himself walking in a greygreen spill of light shaped by the colonnade in the main hall. Along the corridor, pillars stretched up and down, and their torches flickered for a moment.    
  
They sputtered, shifting their color from orange to sickly violet, and back again.   
  
It happened so quick he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. Cullen froze, milksour stomach crowding into his throat.  Unnatural flames, and all the heat gone from them.  He swallowed thickly.  
  
Orphanages were full of frightening things. Shadows scratching the tall windows at bedtime, whispers around the corners that disappeared when someone drew near. As a child, Cullen had lain awake fearing all of them long after he knew their realities. And he’d learned to manage that fear.  But real horrors existed in the world alongside phantom ones, and he’d survived them as well.  
  
If he claimed dominion over anything, sometimes with excruciating difficulty, it was flesh and blood.  Cullen examined the nearest torch, but the flame remained bright yellow and hot.  
  
“Knight-Captain,” said a passing guard.  Cullen jerked.  The guard continued on, his shadow joining that of the pillars.  
  
In his hand, the cup felt rough and real.  But as Cullen stepped between black and light patches the corridor became almost intangible, and the putrid stench of Kinloch’s corrupted tower wafted across his face.  It felt like the breath of close people, friends who shouldn’t be, talking just shy of a whisper.    
  
 _-Would you have done it?_  
 _Of course._  
 _-Me too, if it were you.  Just so you know._  
  
Cullen closed his eyes. Maker preserve her, she would have.  Many nights he still wished she had.  Her voice had taken up residence in his mind, since the tower and on through Greenfell, whispering memories when he most needed silence.  And hers was not the only one.  As he had when they were friends, even in horror, he preferred her presence above all others.  
  
He turned abruptly, heading back toward the kitchen, and glimpsed the edge of a cloak hugging the corner, then gone.  Rushing to catch up, he thought he saw it again:  a robed figure, black as secrets, running through the halls toward the outer gate. His sleepless eyes betrayed him, though. As Cullen followed empty passageways, lurching at shadows, he never caught sight of it again. In front of the barracks, he nearly ran down the night patrolwoman.  
  
“H-have you seen anyone lurking about?” he asked the guard, straightening up.   
  
“No one tonight, Knight-Captain,” the woman replied, and echoed Cullen’s posture a little awkwardly.  “‘Cept you.”  
  
“I wasn’t lur-” said Cullen and then took a breath.  He took another, looking down the dim corridor toward the kitchen. “Nevermind.  As you were.”  
  
Breathing steadily but feeling none of it, he went to his quarters. Rank and necessity made the room private, a decade of service entitling him the right to sleep alone.  He couldn’t return to the barracks even if he wanted to. The door opened under his shaking hand, in the other he still gripped the empty cup.  
  
Inside, Cullen opened his trunk and got as far as fingering the parchment packet containing the sleeping powder. It was supposed to ease him, but the powder was a cheat, and he was not.  He was many troublesome wounds improperly healed, perhaps, but he was no cheat.  He dropped the lid back in place and stretched out on his bed with a soft grunt.  
  
So removed, he couldn’t hear the snoring from the barracks.  
  
Phantoms and demons aside, to be alone was the only fear of truly insurmountable proportion.  Clothed in dreams, painted in the style of familial faces, and obscured by the dirty glass of memory, loneliness thrived on duplication.  Day after day, orphan or soldier, they were alone among so many others.  Multiplied like that, loneliness was an immense, black dragon that visited them every night.  It sat on their chests, and squeezed their hearts.  The fear of it hardened in their growing, unloved bones, becoming a part of them forever.  
  
People did not die of fright. They lived with it.  In his estimation, that was worse by far.  
  
Cullen lay on top of his blankets, eyes full of grit in place of sleep or peace.  The latter he’d lost the shape of, not so long ago, in a cage of malevolent purple light. He turned over and curled toward the wall, smelling candlesmoke in the stone. If rest continued to evade him he would take the powder and consider it dutiful, for his command as much as for himself.  
  
***  
  
Stolen. Had to be. _Bloody Marcher thieves and two-faced-_   
  
Cullen removed the contents of his trunk in their entirety, turned over his mattress, and emptied his bookcase and desk drawers.  For the sake of proof, he performed the fruitless search a second time, and then sat on the floor of his tossed quarters half-dressed and sweating.  He was exhausted, but he wasn’t crazy.  The poppy powder was gone. _Nicked._   
  
Ten long nights, extra combat drills, choking down huge portions at mealtimes, reading the entire set of Genitivi histories (twice), and none of it had brought him a hairsbreadth closer to true sleep.  
  
“There’s nothing for it,” he said, shaking his head in the maelstrom of dust motes. Succumbing to the hilarious injustice of it all should have felt like a warm, familiar homecoming.  
  
He’d have to seek out the Formari herbalist.    
  
After morning rounds, Cullen picked up his lyrium ration, crossed the Gallows inner gate, and strode down into the sun-bleached main courtyard. Solivitus gave him a thin smile as he approached.  
  
“Good afternoon, Knight-Captain, how may I be of service?”  
  
“A tincture for sleeping, if you have it.”  In this corner of the courtyard there were few other knights and no recruits.  Cullen stood at ease.  
  
“You were taking powdered poppy, is that correct?” Sol had already turned to his shelves, pulling out three bottles and an envelope.    
  
“Disappeared from my trunk before I could make much use of it, sorry to say,” he replied, rubbing the back of his neck.    
  
“That particular powder I cannot reproduce,” Sol said, tsking with palpable regret.  Cullen appreciated the man’s dedication, but that feeling turned into a distracting buzz behind his eyes as Sol expounded on the soil content of the Vinmarks, and poppy season in Amaranthine.  He set a few items on the table between them.  “There is a clever madcap potion that might do the trick. Or a standard embrium solution.”  
  
“Whatever you suggest is fine,” said Cullen.  The buzzing had him near to bouncing in his boots, and he started to bake in his plate as the sun middled over the Gallows.   
  
Sol fixed him with a long stare, and then glanced down at Cullen’s hands.  He’d been fiddling with the clasp of his potion pouch, clinking the vials of lyrium inside. With a gentle flourish, Sol plucked up a deep umber bottle and handed it to Cullen.  
  
“Take the embrium. A scant spoon at night with milk or water.”  
  
Cullen thanked the Formari and turned to go.  But after his feet carried him a few paces, he wavered and returned to the stall.  
  
“Is there a way to...” He tapped Sol’s table with a finger.  
  
“Yes?” Solivitus laced his hands together, expectant.  
  
“What I mean to ask is, in your experience with lyrium have you seen many, ehm, _rehabilitated_ templars?”  
  
Solivitus looked away, clearing his throat, and Cullen could see the top of his balding head where it had pinked in the sun.  
  
“I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of background, Knight-Captain,” he said.  Gesturing across his impeccable display of pots and poultices, Solivitus did his best to patch up a rather itchy subject. A subject that Cullen himself had forbidden Sol to discuss with recruits. “There are treatments for most symptoms, but those do not make a cure, I’m afraid.”  
  
Cullen nodded. The buzzing behind his eyes remained, light but insistent.  
  
“Thank you, I was just, well, you never know how these things advance.”  
  
“As you say.” Solivitus gave him another tight smile.  
  
A templar who lived whole and long had to be a better man, a better soldier, than one used-up before their prime.  Of this, Cullen was intimately certain.  In some better world he’d ask to be informed of any scientific progress, or task Sol with tracking down any new findings on the subject. But Cullen didn’t live in a better world, and surviving this one would require more than the pleasant advice, or pity, of a Formari.  
  
Kirkwall’s Circle boasted more surviving members of the Order than most cities. In his limited travels Cullen had never seen so many recruits, so many officers, and the wealth of the Marches had at least a little to do with that. So many stood in his charge, and he’d yet to learn half their names.  
  
“We really do all look the same, don’t we?” Cullen mumbled faintly to himself, squinting across the courtyard. He held out the edge of his hand, covering the far off faces of the other templars.  They appeared headless as they patrolled and chatted. “Take our heads off and no one would know who we were.”  
  
“That, uh, that would be true of most anyone,” replied Solivitus.  
  
After a moment longer, staring at the uniforms strolling beneath his hand, Cullen nodded to Sol and made for the gated steps.  The buzzing in his head quieted.   
  
Dreadful or lovely, every memory would disappear from him in time.  Standing at the iron gate, Cullen glanced at the little brown bottle in his hand, touched the pouch containing his cureless disease, and wondered if it would be so terrible after all.    
  
He’d known a Grey Warden once.  In their separate ways, under even the best circumstances, they two would not live long enough for good memories to take hold.  He regretted now that he’d been so overjoyed to see her alive again, just once, that he’d never asked how she felt about the taint, and the loss it required of her.  She would have been honest.  



	2. what happened?

For weeks Sol’s embrium potion gave him almost no relief, and the prospect of an entire night’s sleep dwindled to a memory.    
  
In Greenfell there’d been a single blacksmith, overworked and underskilled.  For as little as Cullen had been allowed to do there, for all the rest he’d been ordered to take, he’d still insisted on meticulous maintenance of his armor and blade.  Rust and decay knew no rest, always matching the steel itself for constancy.     
  
Once he’d been ordered to Kirkwall, Cullen had seen to his own kit as a small measure of normality in an unfamiliar place.  The Gallows smithy had all but set guardsmen on him after his third insistent attempt to ‘borrow’ a few tools for his armor maintenance. Their compromise had been a grudging gift of some sharpening stones, the proper oils, and soft scraps of faded red cloth.  
  
With the failure of the embrium, Cullen relied on the sole activity that would help him focus, and rose before dawn to perform the lengthy ritual of maintenance; A task that would make him useful, if not rested.  He took his bag, sword, and armor to the training yard.    
  
In a lamplit corner he sharpened, tested, and oiled.  He buffed smooth the pits and chips that’d never be whole. The chain around his neck grew heavy, and the amulet slick with sweat.  Nightmares couldn’t live on this mundane chore.  They required the even breath of sleep, and a soft belly.  His empty stomach sucked itself inward.   
  
Did Andraste guide his hand in the menial as much as the meaningful?  He hoped so.  Cullen cradled his sword in the cloth, oil-rich and pungent, and rubbed it to a high shine.  Nightmares couldn’t live in this, but he could, and he lost himself in its motion.  The cloth made its way around every freshly honed crevice of his armor. By the time he finished, down to the worn cups of his cowters, the sun was up and the yard bustled with templars on morning rounds.  
  
Recruits made formation.  Knights gave their approval, or disdain.  Cullen suited himself, buckling his armor with steady fingers, while the arrhythmic tide of voices and footfalls carried on across the yard.  As he pulled on his gloves Cullen paused, and the sound of the Gallows around him condensed to white buzzing.    
  
There, between the unblemished hills of his first and second knuckle, was a smallish scar.  The polishing oil had left his hands wet-looking and soft, darkening the wound; A wound he’d stopped dreaming about since sleep had abandoned him.  It hummed back like an echo. He pinched the scar, sure that blood would well up to burst through the poorly healed skin.  
  
 _-Maker preserve us! Up in the tower, Ser. Please, help m-_  
 _Stand back!_  
  
Cullen yanked on his gloves, fastened the gauntlets, and took his sword to the practice area for drills.  
  
For an hour he thrust his sword at strawmen.  Sweat sprang up again, exhaustion too, but Cullen plunged through it with the first meager measure of comfort he’d felt in a very long time.  He knelt to swing at invisible knees, and bashed his shield into the post, and slipped his blade between invisible ribs.  Cullen parried and stepped back, dragged the leading foot and shifted his weight.  By degrees the controlled movement gave his numbness a channel.  Still, he knew he wouldn’t sleep, only be consumed with fresh aches and no way to relieve them.

A nasty laugh broke through his concentration.  
  
Recruits in bright, new plate had gathered in a small group.  Three of them, one with a day’s beard Cullen certainly hadn’t allowed, stood with their slack shoulders and their attention turned to the Tranquil servant gliding among the knights.  She carried a tray with a pitcher of cool water and a few clay cups.  Cullen removed his helmet and set it aside.  
  
Drills. Practice. Solitude. Potions. They mocked the sleep he missed and the nightmares he didn’t.  He whispered for Andraste to guide his sword.  Looking down at the plain crossguard, he tried to remember the steps he was losing, the steps in the tower, and the sound of thin soles on stone. He’d been young so briefly that it might as well have been a sort of dream.  
  
They called her over.  
  
As he watched, the shortest of them, with the stubble, took his refreshment and smiled at the Tranquil.  It split his face in a ghastly way.  Then, the recruit murmured something Cullen couldn’t catch. As if calming a horse, the recruit put his hand out, rested it on her head, and slowly pulled her cowl down. She had black hair, braided, and shiny as the preened feathers of a crow.   
  
“What’s it that magic is meant to do?” said the recruit, half to his comrades and half to the woman who stood perfectly placid before him.  The pitcher and cups remained still on her tray.  
  
“Serve man, m’lord,” she replied.  “Not to rule him.”  
  
“And aren’t we glad of it, too.”  None of them laughed, though Cullen suspected they’d have liked to.  
  
Cullen sheathed his sword with rattling force, and pulled his gloves off.  He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough for them all to turn.  The Tranquil woman left the three recruits and crossed the yard to him in no great hurry.  They glared.  He was their superior and still they glared.  But it was the plate that made Cullen burn.  Fine new armor on unshaven, undisciplined, untested dolts.  
  
“Knight-Captain,” said the Tranquil.    
  
Cullen tore his gaze from the other templars.  She was taller than he’d thought, nearly as old as he, with pitch-dark eyes.  Holding the tray with corded forearms, she waited for his request with that perpetual, susceptible stare. The cowl hung at her back, leaving the sunburst scar visible, and her black hair loosened.  
  
“Put down your tray and compose yourself before you finish your work,” he said.    
  
She did so, couldn’t do otherwise, and while she resettled her cowl Cullen drank.  Ignoring the Tranquil’s enviable calmness, he instead watched the recruits make half-arsed formations out in the sunny yard.  
  
When he didn’t look at her or reach for more water, the Tranquil went away without a word.  Her feet traversed the square courtyard tiles like little figurines, shod in felt, sliding across a game board.  Cullen watched her go, the smell of books suddenly teasing his nose, and the internal voice of a lost friend fogging his focus.  
  
 _-Horse to tower four._  
 _It’s a rook, not a tower._  
 _-A tower’s not a bird._  
 _And a horse isn’t exactly a knight._  
 _-Neither are you._

He’d never be sure, now, if that had been her kind of laughter, the kind wrapped in the wrong words, when it was either that or silence.  
   
Cullen went back to his duty.    
  
The recruits gathered to him for training, the stubbled one -it was Ser Ecks, Cullen saw finally- and his two friends made use of the last boss and strawman on the line.  The archers were hopeless.  A third of the rest were decent with a blade, but all cocked-up once a shield was set on their arm.  Some were petulant because joining the Order had been the privilege of choice. Some took his instruction as well as water in a sock.  They had Cullen snappish and ruddy by the end of an hour, when the shine of that new armor seemed to amount to nothing more than a dozen likely corpses.    
  
With bare-faced fear the men and women shrank from his growing impatience, they cringed at his unshielded anger. He looked at them as if they were dead already.  Blinking, he wrestled out of his gloves to wipe away the smeary sweat that blurred his recruits into monsters where they stood.    
  
Cullen ordered them to rest.  But down at the end of the line, Ecks continued hacking away at his strawman.  Cullen strode along the rank of exhausted recruits, hearing Ecks’s grunts as he approached.  The boy was lost to it.   
  
“Stand down, man,” Cullen said.  
  
“I can just- if you please help me, Knight-Captain,” Ecks said between thrusts.   _Help me._ He swung wildly, almost panicked. “Please, ser.”  
  
His sword plunged into yielding straw.  
  
 _-Please, no!_  
  
The training yard shrank around Cullen.  Its warm stone became a reeking prison.  
  
“Stand back, I said!” Cullen reached for Ecks, but it wasn’t reaching.   
  
He saw his own fist, like the head of a maul, colliding with Ecks’s jaw.  The recruit stumbled back.  Behind Cullen the other recruits choked on their surprise.  Looking down at his hand, puzzled by its shape and the absence gloves, Cullen nearly missed Ecks’s sword striking out.    
  
He dodged, grabbed Ecks’s wrist and jerked him forward onto the ground.  Distantly, shouting began as Cullen descended on him.  
  
The second time he struck Ecks, it was with full awareness.  
  
The third time he struck Ecks, Cullen felt as if he could finally breathe.  At the fourth, Ecks screamed from his bloody, gurgling mouth like a goat. Cullen’s fist closed again and it slammed hard into pain.  He struck until his chest opened wide, and he breathed the whole of the world.  
  
***  
  
For an elongated silence Meredith sat still behind her desk, gazing out the window, and Cullen thought, just for a moment, that she had lost some quantity of the strength he’d always ascribed her. Meredith’s vigilance painted itself, pale and purple, around her eyes. But his doubt evaporated when she spoke, and he looked down at his bloodied knuckles.  
  
“Despite what Knight-Commander Gregoir might have you believe, your continued service to the Order is not an act of favoritism, or even pity,” she said. “I require- it requires the steadfast duty you have always exemplified, now more than ever.”  
  
Meredith’s words flung open an imaginary doorway in Cullen’s future, a door that he hadn’t known was there at all. That there would be a time when he wasn’t a templar, by dismissal or some other force, had simply never occurred to Cullen. It should have. He cleared his throat.  
  
“I understand your disappointment, Knight-Commander. I regret it more than I can. . .say.  But these recruits,” Cullen said, back stiffening.  He gripped the arm of his chair, watching his knuckles weep fresh blood.  “They act as if their charges are schoolchildren to be reprimanded.  But mages are hor. . .As members of the Order, there are horrors they must face that cannot be explained academically.  Do you not recall Wilmod? The Champion-”  
  
“Is a temporary exception to our rules,” she finished for him, leaning into her fists on the desk. “An anomaly. A test of the Maker. We accept anomalies but we must not trust them. Don’t change the subject. Why did you do it?”  
  
He’d removed his blighted gauntlets and gloves and couldn’t remember where they were, or when he’d done it.  It occupied him more than the awl-sharp bore of her eyes. Was that an anomaly, too?  Cullen swirled a steady finger over the scar between the first and second knuckle of his bleeding fist.  His hand blazed with pain.  
  
“In the tower, I fought so many demons that it was difficult to trust, to know what was real,” he said.  Meredith frowned deeply at him.  
  
The scar would be white one day, but for now it was still pink and thickly puckered. There’d been an infection because all the healers had been killed. He cleared his throat and held out his hand as if to offer an invisible ring for kissing.   
  
“When I lost my blade I used my hands, my bare fists,” Cullen went on, staring across his raised arm at Meredith’s rocky scowl.  He was jabbering, or close to it.  It made no difference. “Maker help me, there was so much blood I didn’t notice this wound at first.  Not until hours later when it was removed.”  
  
“When what was removed?”  Meredith leaned forward to see.  
  
“A tooth,” said Cullen. “A tooth lodged just there.”    
  
His curled hand remained in the air between them, untrembling, and the stillness of those small muscles made him fold his hands back in his lap. Of course it was difficult to see the scar between the knuckles he’d ruined on Ecks’s face.  
  
What he didn’t tell the Knight-Commander was how, in Ferelden, he’d wailed at the terrified Formari who’d attended him, how he’d had to be restrained in their makeshift infirmary down in the dungeon.  They had strapped him to a cot and drowned him with bitter potions until, voice splintered and fading, he’d stopped screaming the question that tormented him.  
  
Cullen licked his lips. If he asked Meredith would she lie? Would she even know?  
  
Did demons have human teeth?  
  
Meredith waited, more steel than flesh.  Cullen watched the steadiness of her breathing, her posture, her eyes.  Within that silence she’d be formulating ideas.  She would hope in her dreadful way that Cullen could confirm some demon influence within Ecks, that Cullen had acted righteously, and for their very survival. She would like him to tell her that he could, as before, kill for that survival.  And Cullen would have to tell her _yes,_ even the healers.   
  
He covered his bleeding hand and said, “I beg of you, in light of this incident it would be best if I took leave.”  
  
Meredith shut her eyes for a moment, and rubbed them.  Cullen wished he could do the same, and a tidal swell of exhaustion flooded through him.   
  
“I cannot spare you. But, I will assign you temporarily to light duty,” Meredith said.  She got him up out of the chair and corralled him against her door.  “Take some time outside these walls, Knight-Captain.”  
  
“I. . .of course,” he replied.  “My thanks for your understanding.”  
  
That she didn’t understand at all meant less to Cullen than escaping her office, and his armor.  The templar hall passed him by, forgotten as easily as his gloves and gauntlets.  He was halfway to dreaming by the time he pressed open the door to his quarters.  
  
He’d go to the coast, maybe hunt a little. Piece by heavy piece, Cullen removed his armor until he stood beside the bed, swaying a little, in nothing but his breechclout. He thought of the Tranquil, how the tension in her laden arms traveled no farther than the muscle, how she must have slept, secure in her own pale and dreamless fog. His arms moaned deep in their sinews, and his hand throbbed where he’d smashed it -how many times?- against Ecks’s cheek.   
  
Ecks was a boy really. Boys pushed stubbornly. He’d lunged at a commanding officer, after all.  It would be a lesson not soon forgotten, but Cullen remained unsure to which end of the lesson he belonged.  For a commander, for his duty, that would not do.    
  
He would go out, not far but away.  Above this, at last and at no small cost, he would sleep.  
  
“Maker,” he said, empty voice in an empty room, “help me.”  
  
The bed coughed under his dead weight and, for the first night in twenty, he slept.


	3. cat get your tongue? did your string come undone?

The bay’s salt-foul air clung to Cullen’s face and dampened his cheeks.  A pair of hares dangled at his thigh. They were both fresh kills, he felt their weight, but Cullen did not fully remember venturing outside the Gallows, much less hunting. But he was back again, by boat, with the monolithic white walls thrusting up before him.   
  
His sense of things abruptly turned muddy.    
  
He stepped off the barge and _felt_ the way scrubby bushes on the coast snagged his breeches.  As he stood on the dock, looking down at the little bodies attached to his belt, he squinted to see sand beneath his boots instead of wood and stone.  A knife at his hip instead of fur and drying blood.  
  
Muggy coastal wind shoved against him, clarifying his surroundings. He touched the hares gently, as if the harm could be reversed, and then moved along the pier.  
  
“Ser,” said the dockhand as he passed.  Cullen stopped.  
  
“Knight-Captain,” he corrected.  
  
“O’course, Knight-Captain.” The man ducked and made an awkward sweep at the cap on his head. “Thousand pardons. I didn’t recognize you out of uniform.”  
  
Cullen nodded and climbed the steps to the gate.  
  
Around the back of the staff kitchen he found the butcher’s block, and set to work on his catch. They weren’t the fatty, short-eared type he’d hunted in Greenfell.  Long and wiry though these were, Cullen skinned and butchered them all the same, tossing the innards into a nearby barrel.  When they were clean, he took the quartered rabbits inside.

The kitchen was dark, with an intense warmth, and it adjoined the staff mess by way of a short wall and archway.  Templars with little time between shifts often eschewed meals in the barracks mess in favor of the staff hall for its proximity to the yard. Cullen counted five in uniform, bent over half-finished plates with loaves of dark bread beside them.  They gave him and his civilian clothing just a few raised eyebrows as he made for the stove. Mrs. Therish crowded in beside him.   
  
“Let me fry those up for you, Knight-Captain,” she said, reaching for the meat.    
  
“No, thank you,” replied Cullen, watching the cook’s eyes as they questioned, and her shoulders as she shrugged.    
  
He asked her for some flour and lard, and set to searing the rabbits in the heavy, black pan she provided him.  When the meat browned, a rich aroma rising out of the pan, Cullen added the rabbit to a bowl filled with the day’s thick stew.  The seared rabbit sat atop the potatoes and carrots, above the sea of gravy, like the lone survivor of a flood.  It was satisfying to look at.  It was what he’d envisioned since wandering the Wounded Coast.  
  
The coast.  He’d been at the coast all day, and the memory of it surged back briefly, touching his mind the way the foam licked the shore, before receding into the white fog from whence it had come.  He’d been at the coast, as ordered, hunting and breathing salt and the faint metal of foundry fumes.  There were rabbits in the bowl now.  
  
Cullen took his meal, and a small loaf, and joined three other templars at their table.  They grunted a salute as he sat somewhat apart, on the far end of the bench.  
  
“Can’t even count them all.  Lost three bleeding recruits and a Knight-Lieutenant in that Chantry business with the old trank,” Ruvena said, stabbing at her potatoes. “And six more to Varnell’s lunacy.”  
  
The others gave Cullen a quick, sideways glance before continuing.  
  
Cullen ate and his ears grew hot.  He picked the rabbit meat from the bones and found it delicious, more than he’d thought possible for their rangy quality.  At the other end of the table the templars he’d recruited himself, the ones who had stood in formation as he’d presented them with their sashes, talked as if he wasn’t present at all.  
  
“Past few years,” Paxley said, nodding and tapping his fork against his bowl, “well, there’s holes in our ranks big enough to drive a wagon through, Maker knows.”  
  
Sweat trickled from the back of Cullen’s neck, down past the collar of his shirt, and ran for the valley of his spine.  He’d been at the coast and that had been an order, one he deserved and was somehow enjoying.  Looking down he saw that the rabbit was down to bones, nearly gone.  As he dipped his spoon again and again, Cullen stared at the brown-black scabs sketched across his knuckles. He tore up several pieces of bread and dropped them in the stew.  
  
Ruvena snorted and swung her fork with a bit of potato on the end of it.  
  
“And you don’t see the sort of able-bodied soldiers we need lining up to _kill them all, just to be sure_ ,” she said, and stuffed the potato into her mouth.  
  
Cullen flexed his hand, dropping the spoon onto the table with a dull clatter.    
  
“What?” he said.  His voice sounded so far away, stone-muffled, but it must have been loud.  The templars turned to him.  Cullen made a fist and his scabs screamed. “What did you say?”  
  
Ruvena looked slowly from Cullen to her comrades across the table, the bulge of the potato still in her cheek. She swallowed.  
  
“I said, you don’t see anyone lining up to fill them all, you can be sure.”  
  
The staff mess went on with its usual noise, pots and pans and Therish barking at the elves, but at the table everyone was silent.  Cullen gazed at their puzzled faces.   Across the room, someone dropped a cup and it banged the floor like a tinny cowbell.  The other templars shook their heads and went back to their bowls, hunching a little closer together, a little further from Cullen. He’d been there, and just like that he went invisible again.  
  
He gathered his bowl and spoon and took them to the basin where he washed them himself.  Then, he thanked Mrs. Therish, straightened his clothes, and left the mess through the butcher’s back door where he’d first come in.  Just past the threshold, Cullen pivoted to the right, lifted the wooden cap from the offal barrel, and vomited.  
  
Through squinted eyes, he watched his own sick splatter down atop the rabbit carcasses.  When his body ceased its spasming, Cullen replaced the lid with trembling hands and lurched out toward the Gallows courtyard.  The rabbits might have been off, tainted somehow.  Bitter muck clung to the back of Cullen’s teeth.  He took the stairs down and down until they deposited him on the sunbaked stone.  The air was no fresher.  He seemed to smell the stew wherever he turned.  
  
“Ah, you’re back,” said a voice from behind him.  Cullen turned to see the Knight-Commander on the steps above him.  She looked him over.  
  
“Yes, I just,” he said, glancing toward the gates, and then down at his hands.  His mouth still tasted of bile. “I’ve just had mid-day.”  
  
“Good.”  Meredith hardly blinked, he noticed.  She took in so much, eyes as large and shrewd as an owl’s, and she blinked almost not at all.  “As you remain on light-duty, I have a small task for you.”  
  
He listened to her, but all the while a putrid scent assaulted him; The lingering smell of vomit in his nose replaced by something infinitely worse.   
  
A mage sat in the dungeon, with information and no incentive to divulge it, she was saying.   _Your talent for interrogation_ , she was saying. The stench teased water into his eyes.  No odor like it existed in the world, because it wasn’t of the world, and few lived who’d ever lain gasping in it as long as Cullen had.  He nodded up at Meredith.  
  
“See what you can get out of him, then,” she said, and left him in the yard.  She hadn’t seemed to notice the smell he could not escape.  
  
Cullen hurried back to the barracks, back to his quarters where he finally outran the stench, and replaced his clothes with armor.  
  
***  
  
Every Circle sat atop a dungeon.   
  
Though Cullen had only ever seen two with his own eyes, he guessed they were all pretty much the same, with shackles that always numbered greater than the total of each Circle’s residents, including its templars.  
  
It was full day in Kirkwall, but persistent midnight past the threshold to the Gallows dungeon.  
  
He stood at the top of the steps and squinted down through the hazy black corridor, broken at regular intervals by the glint of metal, dull and thick, at each cell.  He thought of them as sums, tallies that didn’t resolve the way he’d first imagined, and he was the kind who needed to tick his fingers to be sure of any count.  He couldn’t remember when that began, his awareness of the discord between the above figures and those below. Lots of memories scratched at him that way.  
  
But some mysteries carried no memory at all.  Cullen touched a spot on his neck, below his ear, where a bruise had formed at some point.  He had no recollection of how it got there.  The bruises, little forgotten cuts and unknown aches, had also grown in number.  
  
Rabbits, fat and thin.  Rabbits, eaten and lost.  Maker, but she’d been good at maths. She’d been good at everything.   
  
Cullen swayed. Again the world sloshed, shifted around his queasy perception, and he was no longer in the dungeon at all.  
  
He stood in the wide open door to the Kinloch study hall, watching her hands, spider-quick, as she passed a note to Eadric, her thick black braid barely swishing against her back.  A cheat, yes, but one born of kindness. Had she really been kind? Or always a cheat? She would tell him to open his eyes, even if they already were.  He would tell her dishonesty wasn’t a kindness, and that it served no one to skip the hard work, least of all the Maker.

The sight of her moved away, the dungeon crept back around him like fog over a lake, and he was once again just a bloody heavy-breather on the steps.  
  
Behind him, the dungeon’s massive door creaked open and the guard poked his head in.  
  
“Will you be needing that cell open?”  
  
“I am not sure,” Cullen said.  
  
“Yes, Knight-Captain,” the guard said. But he lingered in the open door, drumming his fingers on the edge.  When Cullen gave him an irritated glance the guard rattled quickly, “Only the shift’s changing and I’ve got to hand the ring off to-”  
  
“ _Give me a moment,_ ” Cullen barked, and the guard reared back like a startled cat before shutting the door.  The thunk echoed in a way Cullen’s voice had not.  
  
He counted the steps and the iron-barred doors, tapping each with his fingers against his thigh. A templar he’d been and a templar he remained and there would always be mages. There would always be a dungeon for them, and for him. He tried to remember if he’d ever worn shackles, if their weight could be forgotten.  
  
 _Interrogate the mage_ , she’d said.   _Kill the abomination_ , would come the order weeks, or perhaps days, after that.  
  
The lies and protestations awaiting Cullen in the far cell changed nothing.  For all her years of service, the Knight-Commander didn’t see the impotence of this tactic, this preventative aggression.  It was the question of what she _did_ see that kept Cullen rooted to the lowest step when he should have been carrying out his orders.  
  
He tasted no bile, witnessed no unholy flames, and smelled no putrid phantom. Cullen simply breathed, anchored to the dungeon steps.  He saw the shape of his inaction like a king in checkmate. It was a drowned corpse rising, freed of its tether, breaching the surface of a lake.   
  
They were just tallied figures, all of them in every Circle, shrouded in mist-grey robes.  They were white steps staggering upward, and grey steel under grey skies. In the worst way, they were in this together, watching the forest burn closer every day.   
  
Cullen heard someone moving around at the back of the dungeon, light boots stepping on straw, and then silence.  
  
“Hello?” An ordinary sort of voice called out.  
  
He turned and went back the way he’d come without talking to the mage in the last cell.


	4. one by one it comes to us all

Similar to Kinloch’s lofty parapets, Kirkwall’s highest roof, atop the Viscount’s Keep, was a singularly peaceful place.  And the tallest woman Cullen had ever known worked in the rookery there.    
  
Weathered and broad as barn door, Lieutenant Starr had been a member of the city guard for twenty-seven years before taking the bird-keep post. Her size and taciturn nature, intimidating for humans, proved more than tolerable for the pigeons. Outside of a dozen urgent missives delivered to her over the years, Cullen had rarely been to the pigeon loft.  Despite the smell of bird shit, and Starr’s craggy silence, it comforted him.  
  
Besides the pigeons in the aviary, free ravens flapped and strutted and poked around the space. Brazen, they investigated every loose bit of leather, seed, or string.  They opened their dagger beaks to squawk, showing Cullen the briefest glimpse of scarlet.  
  
Holding a hair-thin quill to a strip of parchment no bigger than child’s ribbon he sat in Starr’s outdoor office and composed a coded message. The scabs on his knuckles tightened as he wrote. He had neither the authority nor the temerity to write the words, but they appeared on the paper nonetheless: _Grave and urgent concerns about KC. Fear Order collapse. No one else I trust. Please advise_.  
  
He handed the miniscule parchment to Starr.  
  
“South to-”   
  
“I know,” she said.  When Cullen gave her a questioning look she continued, “Calenhand via West Hill rookery?”  
  
Cullen nodded.  Starr gave him a rough sketch of a smile.  
  
“S’where you sent your only other, er, _personal_ missive.”  
  
Brusquely, Starr took his message and wound it up inside a tiny metal tube. She then selected a pigeon from the aviary’s adjoining corridor and carried it to the launch at the edge of the rooftop.   He joined her, just to watch.    
  
After she loosed the bird, Cullen was loathe to leave.  He felt Starr’s eyes on him, their impassive curiosity, as he stared across the bay toward the Waking Sea. His bird flew straight, a tiny black arrowhead in the sky, and soon disappeared under the crowd of southern clouds.  
  
“What marvelous training they possess,” he mused. If they were happy, they flew. If they were troubled, they flew. It must have been lovely, both in the leaving and the returning; If a bird even enjoyed such things.  Behind him, Starr banged a cupboard door and Cullen turned to find her dragging out a sack of millet.  
  
She said, “I was about to feed them.  You’re welcome to the job, if you like.”  
  
“Of course.”  Cullen took the sack by its open neck.  
  
Starr gave him a terse nod and eased herself into a chair, stretching her massive legs.  
  
The ironwork aviary, open at the top, enclosed a full third of the roof.  Within it grew an ancient cypress tree seemingly rooted to Keep’s own stone. Along the tree’s gnarled arms half a hundred nesting boxes were fastened.  Curious birds ambled out onto their branches to inspect him as soon as Cullen approached the grate.  He pulled out the five empty longboxes, filled them with seed, and pushed them back into the aviary.  A soft cacophony of wings and cooing followed as every pigeon, one only slightly different from the next, perched on the boxes to feed.  
  
Cullen noticed that a pair of birds remained in their box, pressed together and half asleep, while the others nattered away at the seed.  They had a single, mottled egg.  
  
“Do you lose many?”  He looked to Starr.  She’d packed a pipe and paused before touching her match to the bowl.  
  
“Not often, but yeah,” she said, the matchlight briefly smoothing the pits of her face.  She shrugged.  “Fortunately few creatures, eh, _proliferate_ quite like pigeons do. Always another set to replace the lost.”  
  
Cullen nodded. Inside the aviary, the longboxes shuddered under the weight of dozens of birds.  Ravens gathered outside the scrollwork cage to scarf up errant seed. A few poked at the sack of millet he still held.  
  
“And these fellows?” Cullen toed at one of them that sidled close to his boot. It pecked back at him.  
  
“We call them ‘volunteers,’” replied Starr, contentedly puffing her pipe.  “They don’t do anything official, but they’re clever as all get-out.  Ravens are a brilliant warning system, you know, so I let ‘em roost.”  
  
None of these would carry a message, though. These entrepreneurial sorts were too smart for that. Too smart, perhaps for their own good. Cullen thought of his pigeon, winging over the treetops and seaspray.  His bird was just smart enough.  
  
Starr beamed at the shimmering black bodies gathered around his feet, smiling around her pipestem as whitish plumes of smoke veiled her face.    
  
“They bring in bits and bobs from Maker knows where,” she said, and reached back to open her cupboard again.  This time she brought out a plain box and waved for Cullen to join her.  Lacking any polite excuse, he did so, setting the bag of seed on the table between them.    
  
The box contained a variety of shiny junk: broken jewelry, tarnished medals, pearly shells, bright stones, and hundreds of mismatched buttons. Ravens cawed, anxious to revisit their haul, and walked across the table to peer into the box. Cullen nudged them to get a better look.  A smooth, striped, golden stone caught his eye and, with a nod from Starr, he retrieved it for closer inspection.  
  
It contained crystalline inclusions of dusky copper.  Cullen scraped it lightly with his thumbnail.  
  
His lost friend, the version of her that still rattled around in his mind, had been inclined to hoard worthless treasures.  She’d shone lamplight through the facets of those rocks to show him how flawed they all were.  How beautiful, and how purposeful besides.  
  
“Bloody noisy tourists aren’t you?” Starr crooned, opening the seed bag.  Admiration colored her voice, lifting it above her usual charcoal tone.  More ravens flocked to the table, climbing over Cullen’s arms to get at the bag.    
  
Their numbers, guttural chirping, and unflinching black eyes made him prickle. He recoiled a bit, and stopped himself from swatting at them, focusing instead on the smooth stone with its winking striations.  Starr went on feeding the ravens, scratching their heads and throats, her pipe clenched between uneven teeth.  
  
“Keep it,” she said, eyeing the plain treasure in Cullen’s hand.  “They’ll just bring more.”  
  
He nodded, still gazing at the golden stone. But the tranquility of the rooftop succumbed to the press and crackle of black birds, and Cullen felt revulsion flutter under his skin. He excused himself and backed off toward the stairs, watching the dark-shiny bustle of raven bodies as they filled the chair he’d vacated.


	5. it's as soft as your pillow

Carrying the stone he’d taken from the bird-keep, Cullen visited the Chantry.  He arrived after services, so he would not be noticed, and went to the upper nave where shadows and their attending thoughts were deepest.  Sitting in the niche behind Andraste’s gleaming shoulder, he worried the stone with his thumb until it grew warm as skin.     
  
The voice that had so often been with him was quiet.  She’d have liked the rookery and the birds, in particular the ravens.  
  
“And opened all the cages, too,” he said aloud, as if his voice could carry a shared melancholy as easily as a pigeon with a message.  
  
He bent himself to ritual, jotting down his hopes and sins to be burnt in the prayer bowl, and wrote her name over and over until his hand cramped. Under the guilt of his message, winging its way somewhere over the narrow Strait, he wrote his immediate sin of backchanneling. His letters crowded each other or spooled out too far, and the ink smeared. He wrote the names of children, orphans. He wrote another name, a placeholder for one he’d never known, and dug it deep into the parchment as if the sin would rip itself from the embedded places in his mind. An escaped mage, just a tall man, who smelled of Calenhad’s shale studded shore, and of lyrium-hot skin, and Cullen’s stolen clothes. On scrap after scrap, Cullen wrote the names of friends and enemies, and those who’d never had the chance to be either.  His memory, such as it was, kept them whole.  
  
When he was done, Cullen saw that he’d been clutching the stone with his free hand.  He set it aside before burning his scraps of parchment in the little bronze bowl.  The smoke offered little comfort as it rose, trapped along the crossbeams with a cloud of similar complaints.  Cullen stared at the Chantry ceiling, his mind filled and then emptied of thought with the lethargy of shaggy old beasts.  He pocketed his stone and rose to leave when the volume of his worries seemed to stabilize.  On his way to the stairs, glancing toward the shadowy side-hall, he spied a lone Brother cleric kneeling beside a bookcase.  
  
Lay Brothers and Sisters occupied many of the Chantry’s common spaces, but Cullen had rarely seen clerics milling about outside the archives.  The cleric wore full robes.  He was hooded and partially veiled, as if he’d been visiting the afflicted.  There’d been a relieving calmness to the bird-keep, but Cullen saw in the scholarly form of the cleric an opportunity to illuminate, if not resolve, his remaining doubts.  
  
He stepped toward the crouched figure.

“Brother, do you have a moment?”  
  
The cleric jumped, standing up so fast he nearly toppled over, gasping, “Maker’s breath, you scared the life out of me!”  He clutched the bookcase to steady himself.  
  
What Cullen could see of his face was thin and wan, with a straight and prominent nose below exhausted amber eyes. They widened, as if in recognition, at seeing Cullen.  He flinched, though Cullen hadn’t moved.  The cleric looked down and away, searching the empty corners of the small side-hall as if for an escape. Upon noticing Cullen’s confused and questioning face, he cleared his throat, affected a growly sort of voice, and began to yammer.   
  
“I was just, erm. There’s a text I need and so I, well that’s why I’ve been all over. Searching, I mean. For the book. Down in the, uh, cellar and. . .and the uh sleeping place. And here, just what are  _you_  doing skulking about?”  
  
“Forgive me, Brother, I’m truly sorry to have disturbed you.” Yes, Cullen thought disturbed was an apt assessment.  Yet, with some of his startlement receding, the cleric seemed kind.  Scattered, but gentle nonetheless.  To stop the cleric’s wandering, searching eyes, Cullen squared himself as if in presentation for inspection, and then asked quietly, “I wondered if you’d counsel me?  Please, just a few moments of your time.”  
  
“I can do that?” said the cleric, asking himself.  He glanced beyond Cullen’s shoulder toward the empty nave and then took Cullen’s arm. “Sure. I can do that. Have a. . .have a seat over here and we’ll talk.”  
  
The cleric steered Cullen to a table and chairs cramped into a corner of the side-hall.  He doused the sole candle and they sat across from one another in the semi-dark.  A stranger meeting Cullen had never experienced, with the Brother cleric’s slender, fidgety hands folded on the table and Cullen’s armor wedged into a too-small chair. But his need for counsel was great and his options appreciably less so.  The cleric’s haggard eyes blinked at him from beneath his hood, expectant.  
  
“I suppose at the root of it, beyond the constant threats we face, it is my fellow templars that trouble me of late,” Cullen began.  He spoke to the smooth tabletop, but looked up when the cleric leaned forward. “They say things I can’t abide. Twist the Chant and make it a terrible joke.”  Encouraged by the cleric’s rapt attention, and the way he’d stopped bouncing his leg under the table, Cullen came to his point. “I fear their malfeasance might be worse than, well, those we’re sworn to watch.  If that is even possible.”  
  
“Of course it’s possible!” The cleric’s fierce voice hurtled out from beneath his veil, and his hands balled on the table.  Cullen jerked in reflex, immediately guilt-stricken for whatever offense he’d uttered. The cleric seemed to listen for approaching footsteps and then, hearing none, collected himself.  After a long moment during which Cullen was certain he’d be asked to leave, the cleric shrank back into a more solemn posture.  He said, “Are you frightened of wolves, Knight-Captain?”  
  
Maker, he loathed animal metaphors.  
  
“I’m Fereldan. They don’t scare me the way they do most people,” Cullen replied, leaning back in his chair.  He began to reconsider the merit of this particular Brother’s advice.  There remained a feverish flash in his brown eyes.  
  
“Say you come across a wolf alone in the forest. She lets you close enough to touch, but you don’t.”  The cleric tapped the table with a pointed finger. “Why?”  
  
Cullen would have rolled his eyes but for the rudeness of it.  
  
“You cannot trust them. No matter how docile,” he said. “They’ll bite or they’ll kill. It is their nature.”  
  
The cleric leaned more fully over the table, his voice rasping in a mad convergence of supplication and anger.  
  
“But there in the forest you had the opportunity to know a wolf,” he said. “So, you didn’t get bitten. But you also didn’t learn anything new.”  
  
Appearing proud of his murky metaphor, the cleric spread his hands and tilted his head. Cullen considered the forest tableau for the sake of politeness. But some things, deadly important ones, were still as clear as glass to him.   
  
“You cannot know a wolf.”   
  
The cleric seemed unconvinced or, worse, confused. Cullen sighed and continued, “And a wolf hasn’t the capacity to know itself.  People do.”  
  
What if it was the wolves who did the touching? Did he even remember it the right way around anymore? It was a snare, pulled slowly, and once again Cullen could not be sure on which end of the trap he stood.  
  
The cleric cast his eyes around the side-hall, looking for another metaphor hidden in the drapes.  
  
“This isn’t working.”  Cullen rubbed his forehead, feeling enormous in the small chair, misplaced in the world, and confounded by even the simplest things.  Like conversation. He’d wanted a clearer perspective on his duty, not a dead-horse debate.  Cullen stood, stiffly, and told the cleric, “Look, I’m sorry to have troubled you. I think I’ll take my leave now.  Good evening, Brother.”  
  
He left the side-hall and made for the stairs.  
  
“Wait,” the cleric called out from behind him.  
  
Bunching up his robes to get his legs free, the cleric stood and came around the table.  To Cullen he looked like a very tall, hopeful child, clutching the fabric hanging at his sides. But, he sounded nothing like a child.  It was an impossibly older man that croaked, “Do you think the Maker favors them? Mages, I mean.”  
  
“I don’t know,” replied Cullen. “They hope so.”    
  
His eyes traced his own hand where it rested on the bannister.  His knuckles were healing well, the faded brown scabs drawing themselves inward.  They’d be smooth soon, and would disappear altogether.  To the cleric he said, “But I am certain that hope is not enough to defeat horror.”  
  
“Tell me something.”  The cleric came closer to the stairs.  He stopped an arm’s length from Cullen and his eyes bore down like firelit gems. “If true battle lines were drawn, would they be powerful enough, an equal force against their opp- the templars?”  
  
Any thoughtful citizen of Thedas would have asked it.  Many who assumed his experience to be uniquely qualifying had asked it of Cullen himself.  The question puzzled him, for its source and bluntness, and its plain desperation.    
  
“If you’d asked me six years ago I might have said yes,” he answered as truthfully as duty allowed. “The world has such unquestioning love for an underdog.”  
  
It came to animal correlations again. Looking up at the cleric, Cullen felt the prickle of interrogation in his very stance.     
  
He swiveled from those profoundly disappointed eyes to the colossal statue of Andraste. Cullen was bound to uphold laws protecting all citizens, laws purported to come straight from the Maker. The Maker, Andraste might have told him, was an entity that had so far proved remarkably capricious on the subject of justice.  
  
“I think,” he said, swallowing a lump like dry hearthstones, “that if I cannot trust anything I see, then I’m as good as blind.  An enemy can be the same as a friend when you’re groping around in the dark.”  
  
The cleric’s only response was a frustrated, reproachful shake of his hood.  They had nothing further to say, it seemed, so Cullen gave the cleric a gallant bow and turned away.  But again the cleric rushed forward, catching himself on the newel post at the top of the stairs.  
  
“Maybe. . .” he said, the pleading tone creeping back into his voice.   
  
Cullen turned, looking up at him, and for a glimmer of a moment the cleric became the counselor he should have been: Wise and strong, but accepting of his ignorance. If the sun had not already set, Cullen thought the light from the high windows would have illuminated him nicely.  
  
“Maybe you’re looking with the wrong eyes. Reaching with the wrong hands.”  The cleric leaned against the bannister, gripping it. “A templar’s, not your own.”  
  
“But, Brother, they are the same,” Cullen replied. “Or they’re supposed to be.”  
  
He expected the cleric to walk down with him, perhaps escort him to the door and give him a blessing.  The cleric remained planted where he stood, though, rubbing his eyes with long knotty fingers.  
  
Cullen descended the stairs with some hesitation, but the cleric did not call out for him again.


	6. fifteen steps then a sheer drop

The Champion was no anomaly.  
  
Cullen moved in Hawke’s direction and winced, feeling his organs shift toward the new opening in his side. He went to his knees wondering if there were any mages left to patch him.  Would they care to?  
  
“Champion,” he heard himself say, so quietly.  No one turned.  Pain rushed in, and then out again, chasing blood from his body.  But no demons materialized, no specters wearing familiar faces taunted him.  Because victory was an infrequent visitor, Cullen hadn’t the wherewithal to accept it at first glance. He cast his eyes around the quiet, ruined courtyard.  
  
Save for its surviving combatants, the battleground was still: The guardian statues, the sundered stone, the haze of dust, the dead, and even the leftover sigh of magic hanging in the air.  All as fixed as a painting.  Gasping, swallowing, Cullen looked up to make certain the sky was not a purple lie closing in.  It was blue and indifferent.   
  
Disastrous as it was -and it certainly was- the Gallows hadn’t become a second Kinloch.  With what strength remained in him, Cullen allowed himself a measure of pride for that.    
  
Hawke and the ragged apostate, the dwarf and the elves, even Captain Vallen. . .Kirkwall’s reluctant defenders helped him to his feet. For a second time in too many close years he found himself surrounded by uncommon heroes, and they bled just as freely as he did.  They were mute, just as bloody _flattened_ as he was, apparently.  
  
If they said anything to break the suffocating silence, it was not to him.  The beautiful dark woman, with one flashy gold earring ripped from her ear, was the first to turn and go.  He lacked the will to stop the rest as they followed her, or decided they’d earned the reprieve, Cullen didn’t know which.  
   
Watching them leave, their backs bent toward each other, for each other, Cullen experienced a peculiar pang. He wanted to desert his post.  Around him, the other templars pulled their helmets off, mouths working like air-drowned fish.  But Cullen felt light as milkweed. He could leave, strip his armor and slip away down a quiet stream untouched by the chaos. Possibility corrupted him.   
  
There was no stream, though. The rioting ocean of conflict would surge over everything, and Cullen felt exactly like one of a thousand dulled stones on the shore. He was a thoughtless bit of detritus, a grey bird invisible for its sameness.    
  
“ _Look_ ,” came shouting in his cottony ears, “ _Andraste’s tears, look!_ ”  
  
Radiating scorch marks scarred the Gallows stone, stretching under Cullen’s feet alongside the blood. Bodies around him leaked their last life into the cracks.  At their center sat the blackened husk of the Knight-Commander. Cullen approached it with far less terror than he’d imagined.  What gore there’d been had burnt away.  All her pillars of support had failed and fallen, including himself.  Her eyes and tongue were gone.  
  
Cullen touched it.  The surface of what had been Meredith was still hot, steam dribbling between the fissures. And then, the ashen statue fell apart, piling softly on the ground. Behind him, men gasped.  
  
“What do we do, Knight-Captain?”  
  
Cullen turned.  
  
“Send the swiftest rider to-” He stopped.  Starkhaven, where the templars were decimated? Orlais?  The man shifted, waiting for orders, his face still slack with shock.  Cullen looked at them all as they gathered to him, creaking like dead timber after a fire.  
  
To the Knight-Lieutenant he said, “Call for the bird-keeper.  I’ll send word to Val Royeaux.  Get the swiftest rider mounted and heading for Cumberland immediately.”  
  
They moved because it felt right, it felt common, and safer than watching gusts of wind blow the sooty pile of Meredith’s remains across the courtyard.  On his orders, the Gallows crawled back to life, shaking itself from a shared nightmare with resolute voices.  Sound and echo returned to the broken walls.    
  
The templars hurried to the business of containment, of duty, and Cullen followed, gathering speed as he passed the enormous bronze guardians littering the yard.  
  
***  
  
A paltry contingent of reinforcements from Cumberland and Ostwick arrived within days.   
  
Cullen became the Knight-Commander in practice only, his tenure both unofficial and uncertain.  He refused Meredith’s chambers and kept his own, but she followed where he could not bar her out.  His nightmares became fewer but more intense, red replacing violet, Uldred blackened and peeling and stripped back to birth the true Knight-Commander. As soon as she manifested, though, Meredith burst at every joint and sinew. What writhed beneath that second skin Cullen trembled to know.   
  
He gasped awake, breaking his mute terror and the paralysis of dreams.    
  
Though he could sleep again at will, the fulfillment of his prayer for it came too late. In the wake of the Chantry explosion and Meredith’s savagery, an excess of new and urgent distractions followed. They disregarded Cullen’s ill-timed victory over insomnia. Too many tasks, too much confusion, too many urgent knocks on various doors allowed him no more than a few hours of rest.  
  
Cullen took to Meredith’s desk, but could not sit behind it long. Hightown’s tall, freshly-scarred walls demanded his presence, and daily he visited the triage tents at the Chantry. It was hardly more than a crater dressed with canvas bandages.    
  
Surrounding estates, once clean and bright with noble family awnings and gardens, now displayed their blackened and bloodstained wounds with shocking clarity.  The streets and alleys stank in a weeklong pinkish mist of death, stone dust, and sulphur.  Cullen met with Captain Vallen, who gave him names and eyewitness accounts of mage rebellion, murder, and more than a few acts of heroism.  Mostly they sat across from one another in her office, both of them careworn and quiet, both of them too furious and exhausted to have an argument about who was doing more to contain the plague of violence.  
  
In the city, Cullen passed wall after wall of paste-paper notices.  He looked for the Brother cleric, but found nothing to confirm his death or survival.  Where the Chanter’s Board had stood there lay beautifully painted images of Grand Cleric Elthina, descriptions and hasty memorials for loved ones missing or dead, and Cullen made note of every name he encountered before boarding the barge back across the harbor. But by sunset the collected names were mundane, forgotten beside other conscience-numbing tragedies piled on his borrowed desk.  
  
Damages in the Gallows had been restricted largely to the templar hall, offices, and a row of mage quarters.  But a few important services had been disrupted. During the battle, Meredith’s guardian statues had mangled a critical aqueduct, and her sword had set fire to the merchant stores and several ferry barges moored too close to the main gate.  
  
Cullen ordered private schooners to shuttle barrels of water from the mainland. He contracted Guild dwarves to repair the aqueduct. With Captain Vallen’s grudging approval, city guardsmen filled small but crucial roles in the Gallows where templars had been lost and were unlikely to be replaced.   
  
Their phylacteries destroyed by Orsino’s mad company of revolutionaries, some mages escaped or wandered off in a daze of trauma. Many stayed and offered their aid in return for fresh air and unlocked doors. Cullen assented. He appropriated supplies from incoming ships and for his bullishness was roundly, and publicly criticized. He received threats of takeover. He received accolades for bravery. He received gobs of spit in his face, and scathing declarations of mage war from neighboring city-states.   
  
He received silence from Orlais.   
  
However menial the task, Cullen acted, because inaction had served evil. He too had been its cringing slave. But the impact of his efforts, post-mortem as they were, amounted to no more than the pathetic plip of pebbles in an ocean.


	7. how come i end up where i started?

One stagnant evening, weeks after the attack, Cullen kept watch in the Gallows main yard.  He was alone but for two guards at the outer gate, and the slow figure of the black-haired Tranquil woman.  Unharmed and unbothered, she moved toward the staff mess, crossing the battle-gouged stone with her pitcher and cups.  She had continued working, as tirelessly Elsa and the others of her kind, to organize and support the templars. Cullen didn’t even know what to call her.    
  
Moved by a desire for some small custom amid the ashes, he summoned her over.  
  
“What is your name?” he said, when she stood before before him.  
  
“I am Meron, Knight-Captain.”  
  
She wore her usual hood and grey robes.  Her hair would fade to grey, too, before long, and her scar would fade with it.   
  
He took a clay cup, poured himself some water and asked, “Have you any desire to leave, Meron?”    
  
“No, Knight-Captain,” she replied.   
  
As he drank, Cullen studied her crows feet and her untrembling hands as they held the tray.  What did one talk about when there was only one subject left in the world?  He shared no real fraternity with Meron, but her honesty was a guarantee.  “The others, do they speak of treachery, or escape?”  
  
“No, Knight-Captain,” said Meron, and then surprised him by continuing, “when they speak, it is about fear.”  
  
He set his cup on the tray.  
  
“Fear? What can they fear now?”  
  
“They speak of widespread, open conflict between mages and templars.”  She paused not to compose half-truths or soft assurances, which Cullen knew to be beyond her, but to find the most efficient words.  Meron said, “Their circumstances have been altered.”  
  
When Cullen did not refute her statement she seemed to think him confused, and added, “You no longer require justification to kill them.”  
  
“Justification,” he whispered, the repetition solidifying the concept in his mouth.  He held Meron’s placid stare.  “Do you share their fear?”  
  
“No, Knight-Captain.”  
  
Cullen believed her.  Meron’s reality and her damnable victimhood required it.  More than that, though, he envied her.  
  
“Of course you don’t,” he muttered.  “Thank you, that will be all for tonight.”  
  
She went away, as quiet as a ghost, and Cullen was again alone in the courtyard.  
  
He walked to the center of the blast marks.  The black scars would wash away during the next rainfall.  The rubble would be swept and sorted into neat piles, and neater still the carts and barges stacked with the dead. Under his hand, or in spite of it, Kirkwall’s shattered bones would set themselves.   
  
Cullen went to his solitary chamber and fell into a numb sleep.  
  
After three weeks and some dragging days, when the white shroud of dust began to dissipate, the Hands of the Divine reached out for him.    
  
***  
  
They said she hunted mages. They said she colluded with them.  
  
They said she rode a dragon, and slayed it at the feet of the Divine herself.  
  
Templars gossipped in the hall as the Seeker’s soldiers marched through Kirkwall, and Cullen hadn’t the conviction to chide them for their impertinence.  He too listened raptly to the tales.  
  
He met Cassandra Pentaghast at the Gallows pier, watching the barge that bristled with Seeker sunshields until it moored, and offered to steady her as she disembarked.  She refused his hand without a word. Instead, the iron-jawed Pentaghast nodded and brushed past Cullen, striding toward the gate.  A redheaded woman, clad in Seeker leather, reached out to accept Cullen’s hand with a smile that did not reach her eyes.    
  
Though she and her entire contingent of soldiers smelled like a week’s worth of hard travel, Pentaghast waved his offers of refreshment, or even the comfort of a chair once they were sequestered in Meredith’s office.  The redhead stood beside the desk, and her pretty eyes wandered the walls, the piles of parchment, in vague interest or practiced perception.  Her lack of introduction unnerved him less than her inspection of the office.  
  
Pentaghast asked him to explain.  That he did so behind a desk instead of a violet cage put Cullen no more at ease about the haunting familiarity of the words.  
  
Hot sunlight washed into Meredith’s office from the windows while Cullen delivered as succinct a report as could be managed for such events.  Sweat dampened his tunic under the full press of armor, the coastal spring, and Pentaghast’s stare.  
  
She began pacing before he finished his prepared speech.  
  
“You did not imprison the First Enchanter. You did not detain the Champion.” She stated facts, not questions but confirmations of his failure, as her short strides brought her from the desk to the window and back again. “You did not apprehend the apostates.”  
  
Cullen wanted to look anywhere else, but he held her gaze. “No.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Half our ranks were wounded or worse, and the city was in flames,” he answered.  “There wasn’t time.”  
  
Pentaghast leaned across desk, fists planted in a vehement mimicry of Meredith’s own.  
  
“Revolutionaries spread chaos and fear in the city and you didn’t have time to question them?”  She pounded the desk with a solid thump.  
  
“They were not revolutionaries, _for Andraste’s sake_.”   
  
He stood up too swiftly and his chair slammed into the bookcase behind him.  The redhead flinched and Pentaghast scowled, the change in her expression minimal but palpable. Cowed by his outburst, Cullen examined the desk for evidence, some meaningful scrap of _why_ and _how_ and _for what purpose did they suffer and kill_ , some scribbled answer tucked among the names of the dead and the orders for replacement armor.   
  
His eyes fell, like coming home, like blessed sleep, on the little golden stone from the bird-keep that he’d been using as a paperweight.  Calming somewhat, Cullen said, “The Knight-Commander became. . .she wanted to murder everyone.   _Everyone_ , do you understand?”   
  
The two Seekers gave each other a look that excluded Cullen and his mismanaged composure.  He did not sit down again.    
  
“The Champion, Vallen, even the apostates,” he said, jamming a pointed finger onto the parchment containing his written report.  “They risked their lives to stop her.  By my account, they were heroes in every sense of the word.”  
  
“Our sources tell a different story,” Pentaghast said. The redhead nodded, though she appeared to take a keener interest in the contents of the desk than in Cullen’s narrative.  “They claim a companion of the Champion was responsible for the destruction of the Chantry.”  
  
Cullen watched the redhead as she flipped through sheaves of parchment, quelling the urge to snatch them from her, but when Pentaghast mentioned the Chantry he tore his eyes away.  
  
“I have heard no such claims,” he replied, stymied.  “Our focus has been to maintain the Order in the wake of the Knight-Commander’s catastrophic madness.”  
  
“I was not sent here to discuss Meredith,” said Pentaghast, voice climbing to fill the stuffy office.  “The Grand Cleric is dead.  There must be collaborators, agitators or sympathizers who can tell us why.”  She crossed her arms over the sunburst on her chest.  
  
He heard the words, but Cullen’s attention was drawn to the redhead. And her attention condensed to one particular thing.  Her gloved fingers closed around the smooth, gold stone, and she plucked it up to study it.  
  
“Please don’t,” Cullen murmured.  
  
He was aware of Pentaghast, the menace of her impatience growling like a summer storm somewhere in his periphery.  But the stone, in a stranger’s hands, held him in a bizarre sort of thrall.  
  
“I apologize,” said the redhead, her voice honeysweet.  Beautiful eyes, calculating in a way he would never be, met Cullen’s. “It must be dear to you.”  
  
Instead of putting it down, she held it out to him.  
  
The accent placed her firmly in Orlais.  The pretense of handing him the stone gave her the opportunity to look closely at his scabbed knuckles.  Cullen took the stone and said nothing, which resulted in a pair of raised russet eyebrows.  He turned back to his interrogator.  
  
Pentaghast sighed and dragged a hand across her forehead.  She could have been Cullen in any number of dank mage quarters.  He could have been Pentaghast in any number high-arched court chambers.  They both wore flames like it was the same as enduring them.   
  
She leaned on the desk in the first display of fatigue Cullen had yet seen.   
  
“Time is the enemy of truth, Knight-Captain, and it is has many allies. As servants of the Divine, we must have the same, and quickly,” Pentaghast said.  
  
Cooperation was so basic as to be forgettable to history.  It earned no beatific statues in the Chantry, no hero’s festival day.  Cullen coveted none of those things, but neither did he wish to wear Maferath’s hunched mantle.   
  
“The dwarf, Tethras,” he heard himself murmur.  “And the Guard Captain.”  
  
He squeezed the little stone in his bare palm but did not look at it.  
  
“They are known associates of the Champion, and they remain in the city.”  Cullen licked his dry lips.  He appealed to the loyalist in Pentaghast, saying, “Please, allow me to have them summoned.”  
  
“Very well.”  Having achieved some predetermined goal, Pentaghast and the Orlesian seemed to snap together as neat as arrows in a quiver.  She said, “I will be investigating the Hawke estate.  Send them there.”  
  
Cullen nodded.  He worried the stone with his thumb. The residence had been called Amell, once, but he thought it unworthy of mentioning now.   
  
Pentaghast swept out of the office with the Orlesian close behind.  When they were clear, Cullen closed the door with a gentle push, and then exhaled lengthily because he could not bellow until he was hoarse and empty from it.

From behind the safety of the door he ached to shout that he had only ever been what was needed.  What was he if not a tool, well-used?  The life of a templar promised nothing, from the moment one first held a sword, and only the profoundly foolish accepted their hollow reward with surprise.    
  
Low talking continued in the hallway.  He wiped a clammy hand against his skirt and thought of Gregoir’s threadbare sash, of Meredith’s coal-ember voice, the Brother cleric’s scattered counsel.  Like the inclusions running through the little stone, Cullen was embedded in another calamitous story, but irrelevant to its observers.  No one counted his sins when they were annexed to disaster.  A more cynical man would pray for perpetual war.    
  
The Order still existed.  He bore its heraldry.  However, no matter the muffled discussion going on in the hallway, Cullen could not be a false Knight-Commander for a moment longer.  He could be bloody useful, though.  
  
He sweated, fingers drifting over the door latch as Pentaghast’s strident voice faded down the hallway.  The Orlesian’s words were too soft to be discerned under their footsteps.  
  
She sounded gentle, comforting, almost cooing.   _Cooing_.   
  
The desperate, forgotten message from a month before slammed into the front of Cullen’s mind with the dumb force of a bird against a window.  In all the chaos, he’d forgotten that no word had come back to him from Gregoir. He huffed wryly.  
  
The blighted bird had probably gotten lost.    
  
A forthright act so pathetic, so fragile, meant precisely nothing now.  He’d tried his hand at insurrection, and the bird was lost while his roost remained:  Starr, Vallen, Moira, Paxley, Ecks, Alain. Was there an Ella? A Jake?  Who were the others?    
  
 _Meron_ , he reminded himself with some effort.   
  
The men and women who served, and those they protected, tumbled against one another in Cullen’s mind, weightless as feathers in an updraft. At one time he’d known each and every name, but now they began to lose their way beneath the fog in him.  And there were no prayer bowls left from which to offer them peace anyhow.  
  
“Orphans all over again,” he muttered, his fit of sentimentality extinguished by duty.    
  
Cullen pocketed his stone and opened the door.   
  
To the two templars posted outside he said, “Please inform the Guard Captain that Varric Tethras is to be collected at the Hanged Man and delivered to the Seeker immediately.”  
  
“Yes Knight-Captain.”  
  
They saluted him with practised synchronicity.    
  
He then added, “The Seeker will want an audience with the Captain herself, make sure she knows.”  
  
They nodded.  
  
Their indistinguishable forms marched in tandem out of the templar hall.    
  
Cullen followed just past the inner gate to see them cross the main yard, which lay bathed in blinding white afternoon light.  He stood in the cool shadow of the Gallows landing, watching the bob and jerk of their bright armor as they passed over the scorch marks.  The two templars disappeared down the steps beyond the main gate, a pair of knights walking off the end of a chessboard.


End file.
